Reinstate funding to continue ABMDR'S Strength to Give cheek swab program for lifesaving blood stem cell donors

In 2019, at the age of 29, I was diagnosed with a leukaemia that was resistant to chemotherapy and told that I needed a stem cell transplant to have any chance of surviving. Unfortunately, my siblings weren't matches (only 30% of people can find a match in their family), so a search on the Australian Bone Marrow Donor Registry was completed, and I was lucky enough to match with an unknown donor - a complete stranger who saved my life.

In 2019 the Australian Bone Marrow Donor Registry's (ABMDR) Strength to Give program launched as a way for young Australians aged 18-35 to register online for their free cheek swab kit and join the Registry's database of people ready and willing to step up and save the life of someone who has blood cancer. The cheek swabs make joining the Registry easy and accessible - the kit is posted out to you to do at home; you simply swab your cheek and return it. Cheek swab registration is the leading way of joining registries throughout Europe and the USA; without this, Australia sadly falls behind. Only 20% of Australians can find a donor here in Australia. This number is much less for people with mixed heritage.

Cheek swab registration is an internationally accepted, reliable, and successful method for registering new donors, BUT the Registry cannot continue the swab method of recruitment without Government funding. 80% of donations come from overseas, which is costly, logistically challenging, and high-risk. Never has this been more obvious as when COVID-19 shut our borders. Patients needing a lifesaving stem cell transplant are at the brink of death and do not have time on their side! If I hadn't found a match, I would have been dead within months.

The Australian Red Cross Lifeblood is currently funded to recruit people to the Registry but registering as a donor is not easy or straightforward. People can only sign up when they donate blood - which excludes gay and bisexual men, people who have resided in the UK, people who live a long way away from a donation center, and others who can't give blood for other reasons. There's little to no information or education available via Lifeblood - this is why we need Strength to Give to be funded! I have often spoken to people who regularly donate blood but have never found out about joining the Registry. There is also a lack of awareness around the procedure to donate stem cells - 90% of the time, donating is a simple procedure similar to giving blood (No big needles to the bone and only takes around 4 hrs!). Only about 10% of patients require bone marrow donations, and it's typically for babies and young children.

Help ABMDR to reach their goal of adding 100,000 new donors to the Registry within the next five years. Without Strength to Give, the donor pool was actually shrinking as people age out of the requirements. Please support this campaign to get the required funding to ensure cheek swabs can continue to be used to sign up to the Registry, and consider writing to your local

state and federal MPs to ask for them to add weight to our advocacy. We need to do this to ensure the Strength to Give programme starts again and is funded to run at the scale required to educate and recruit young Aussies 18-35 and save lives.